Self-exiled Dr. John keeps coming back
The voice of hoodoo rocker and piano professor Dr. John is deep and groggy — just like Satchmo’s. Both were child prodigies. Both loved New Orleans food and showed it.
Satchmo also had range, charisma and a penchant for showmanship. Likewise, the 64-year-old Dr. John is the consummate showman from New Orleans — singing and writing his way into musical memory, not letting up despite a slew of health troubles from a body worn down by 30-plus years of heroin addiction.
His newest compilation, “The Best of the Parlophone Years,” reaffirms why Dr. John, “the Good Doctor,” is the toast of New Orleans, a “cultural ambassador” worthy of comparisons to Armstrong.
The compendium portrays an aging man with a 50-year body of work. He sings with Randy Newman and Cyril Neville; he gets down with the New Orleans brass band sound; he rocks out and pays tribute to legends like Duke Ellington, Earl King and Professor Longhair.
While the similarities between Armstrong and Dr. John are eerie, the disparities are glaring too.
Armstrong was black, Dr. John white. While “Dippermouth,” as Armstrong was nicknamed, played hot sexy jazz, Dr. John, “the Night Tripper,” concocts a sound brimming with R&B, rock, jazz, country and funk.
But Dr. John and Armstrong reflect another side of the New Orleans musical tale: The rags-to-riches side of it. The down side — it’s hard to stay in New Orleans and become famous as a musician.
Both of these New Orleans-loving characters left with heavy hearts. Armstrong never returned to live here and Dr. John’s returns are usually brief. But both men could never forget New Orleans.
“If I don’t get my crawfishes every now and then, I’d start losing it,” Dr. John, whose real name is Mac Rebennack, recently told Nick Spitzer, the host of public radio’s “American Routes.”
Dr. John, who turns 65 this fall, has lived in New York City and Long Island, N.Y., for nearly 25 years. But at heart he’s a New Orleans boy through and through. He speaks in New Orleans argot and street talk, dropping endings, mixing up verb tenses and ignoring correct pronunciation — saying “bidness” instead of “business.”
Musically, it’s all about New Orleans. His latest album, which came out last year, was called “N’awlinz: Dis, Dat Or D’Udda.” His album “Goin’ Back to New Orleans” won a Grammy Award in 1992. His “Gumbo” album put him on the charts in 1972.
He’s a walking temple to New Orleans: He wears berets, guayabera shirts, a fandangle of jewelry, Mardi Gras colors.
And just like Armstrong, he’s a mama’s boy who grew up happy on big servings of great Louisiana cooking when he got home from crazy jaunts around New Orleans. Armstrong’s local insight came through working as a coal deliverer in Storyville as a child; and for Rebennack it came by going along with his father to fix bars’ P.A. systems in New Orleans’ nooks and crannies.
“He has become a poster child. You cannot separate Dr. John from New Orleans. He’s like Louis Armstrong. He’s like a cultural ambassador,” said Michael Hurtt, a New Orleans music writer. “He’s basically packaged this culture he came out of with a lot of nuances that are pretty subtle.”
From early on, it was clear that Rebennack was different.
As a child, he hung out with blacks — something few whites did in the 1950s — and adopted the legendary studio of Cosimo Matassa as a second home. He dropped out of high school and got into music full-time, living a fast-paced, drug-addled existence. He played gigs ranging from strip clubs, auditoriums, roadhouses and chicken shacks. And he lost his left hand’s ring finger — one of his guitar fingers — in a shooting incident in 1961 in Jacksonville, Fla.
Dr. John blames former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his tough-on-crime stance for driving him out of his beloved city. During the early 1960s, Garrison went after prostitutes, bars and all-night music venues.
The underworld sweep put Rebennack in prison. At that time, he was a respected session musician but also a heroin junkie. He would be a changed man after he got out of federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas.
At age 24, he packed his bags and joined friend and mentor Harold Battiste in Los Angeles, a member of AFO Records who’d left New Orleans for brighter lights and bigger opportunities.
In California, Rebennack blossomed into his own.
Likewise, Armstrong left New Orleans by train in the fall of 1922. He’d been summoned by band leader Joe Oliver to Chicago. The telegram from “Papa Joe,” an early New Orleans jazz great and mentor to Armstrong, said the band needed a cornetist on the double. Armstrong didn’t hesitate and didn’t see New Orleans again for nine years.
“Louis’s own life can be broken down into two distinct phases: everything that occurred before he received the telegram, and everything that occurred after,” writes Laurence Bergreen in “Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life.”
Armstrong’s wild, free and dashing style went on to transform the face of jazz and the 20th century.
A similar distinction can be made for Rebennack: there’s the New Orleans phase and the post-New Orleans phase.
When he got to California, Rebennack, who’d long had a fascination with occult mysticism and voodoo, told Battiste about his idea of doing voodoo music and creating a musical personality out of Dr. John, a male version of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen.
“It was really done sort of tongue-in-cheek,” Battiste said in a recent interview.
But it worked. Dr. John was born and Rebennack got his first personal recordings done in what became “Gris-Gris,” a 1967 classic of underground American music.
“One thing you can say is that as for the voodoo stuff, no one had ever done anything like that before,” Hurtt said. “The stuff sounds very weird to us. I don’t even know if it would make it today.”
But it carried Dr. John into the circle of rock greats. He hung out with The Grateful Dead, jammed on The Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” album and collaborated with countless others — among them Earl King, Van Morrison and James Booker.
Over the decades since Dr. John was born, Rebennack has suffered through over 30 years of heroin addiction, troubles with the law, broken marriages and spineless music executives.
But he’s survived and ranks among the most enduring New Orleans musicians, right up there with Fats Domino, the Neville brothers, Pete Fountain, the Marsalises and Irma Thomas.
“It seems like he was rediscovered, perhaps in the last decade and a half,” Hurtt said. “A lot of new New Orleans music, his stamp is on it.”
He misses his New Orleans, but for some reason can’t return for good to its mouthwatering food, laid back hangouts and sun. Instead, just like Armstrong before him, Rebennack sings and writes about it.
“In New Orleans, in religion, as in food or race or music, you can’t separate nothing from nothing,” Rebennack writes in his autobiography, “Under A Hoodoo Moon.” “Everything mingles each into the other … until nothing is purely itself but becomes part of one fonky gumbo.”
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On The Net:
Dr. John’s Web site: http://www.drjohn.org/